10/20/2025
Parenting adult children is a major transition for families! This excerpt gives some excellent ideas for navigating those relationship changes.
Upstate Integrative Family Therapy, LLC helps families through these challenges in a safe space by helping to build healthier communication and better understanding between family members.
It's a particular kind of heartbreak parenting adult children. You watch the child you once held, guided, and protected choose a path you wouldn’t. Maybe it’s reckless, maybe just different—but your hands ache to reach out, to stop the fall you see coming. Yet you can’t. Not anymore. They want freedom, even if it costs them.
The love doesn’t fade; it deepens, even aches. You’re no longer the authority, but still the one who’d take their pain without hesitation. And so comes the hardest balance—how to love fiercely without holding tightly, how to care deeply without taking control.
Sometimes our protection wounds. Advice sounds like criticism. Help feels like mistrust. Other times, afraid to interfere, we grow silent when presence was needed most. The line between support and smothering is impossibly thin.
This is the ache Jim Burns understands. In Doing Life with Your Adult Children: Keep Your Mouth Shut and the Welcome Mat Out, he writes not as an expert, but as a parent who’s lived it. With decades of guiding families, Burns offers not clichés but clarity: parenting changes—it doesn’t end. The healthiest bonds grow from respect, trust, and steady love. He shows how to stay close without crowding, to offer wisdom without wounding, and to remain a safe place, no matter the storm.
Here are six truths that might change everything:
1. Your role has shifted—grieve it, then embrace it.
The hardest pill to swallow: You are no longer in charge. Parenting at 18 isn't parenting at 8. You've gone from director to consultant, from authority to ally. Your opinion matters only when they ask for it. Your guidance only lands when it's wrapped in humility, not certainty. Parents who cling to control find themselves on the outside looking in. Parents who honor the shift find something better: a relationship between equals, built on mutual respect rather than hierarchy. It requires death—the death of who you were to them—but what rises in its place is worth the loss.
2. Silence is not abandonment; it's trust.
The book's subtitle is its beating heart: Keep your mouth shut. Bite your tongue more than feels natural. Resist the reflex to comment, correct, or critique. Your adult children don't need your real-time analysis of their job, their partner, their parenting, their choices. What feels like care to you often feels like control to them. Unsolicited advice, no matter how loving, is usually received as judgment. Burns doesn't say stay silent because you don't care—he says stay silent because you do. Silence, paired with presence, says: "I trust you. I'm here if you need me. But this is yours to figure out." That message, more than any advice, is what keeps them coming back.
3. The welcome mat must never be pulled in.
This is non-negotiable. No matter the disappointment. No matter the disagreement. No matter how far they've strayed from what you hoped for them. Your door stays open. Your heart stays soft. They need to know—deep in their bones—that your love isn't conditional on their performance, their choices, or their conformity to your expectations. The welcome mat is a symbol, yes, but it's also a sacred promise: "You belong here. Always. Not because of what you do, but because of who you are. My child. Forever." When everything else in their world feels uncertain, your acceptance cannot be.
4. Help without crippling; give without enabling.
Money complicates everything. Many parents wrestle with the question: When do I help, and when do I let them face the consequences? Burns's answer is wise and nuanced: Be generous, but not foolish. Help in a crisis. Don't fund irresponsibility. There's a difference between a safety net and a hammock. Helping once communicates love. Helping repeatedly for the same self-inflicted problem communicates something else: "I don't think you're capable." Healthy boundaries aren't selfish—they're an act of respect. They say, "I believe you can do hard things."
5. Love them through the differences—even the ones that scare you.
Your adult children may not vote the way you vote. They may not worship the way you worship. They may not love the way you think they should love. Their values may feel like a rejection of everything you tried to instill. This is where many parents lose their children—not through silence, but through the desperate attempt to argue them back. Burns urges a different path: Listen. Ask questions. Be curious instead of combative. Accept that influence isn't the same as agreement. Trying to control their beliefs will only close the door between you. But staying present, even in the discomfort of difference, keeps the relationship alive. And an open relationship is your only hope of any real influence at all.
6. Trust is the only foundation left.
In the end, everything rests on trust. Not naïve trust that they'll never fail—they will. But trust that you did your best. Trust that they are capable of learning, growing, stumbling, and rising again. Trust that love, not control, is what holds a relationship together when everything else falls apart. You are no longer raising them. That work is done. Now, you are walking beside them—two adults, trying to figure out life, each with your own scars and your own wisdom. The question is no longer "How do I shape them?" It's "How do I love them well?" And the answer is simpler than you think: Show up. Stay open. Let go.
Parenting adult children is an exercise in powerlessness. You have influence but no control. You have history but no authority. You have love—so much love it could drown you—but love alone doesn't determine outcomes. What it does determine is whether you'll still be standing there when they need you. Whether the door will be open when they finally turn around. Whether home will still feel like home.
That's the work now. Not shaping them, but staying steady. Not fixing them, but being findable. Not controlling the story, but remaining a character they want in it.
And maybe, just maybe, that's enough.
BOOK: https://amzn.to/3KOUuAj
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